While the media stir up a dust cloud chasing the tail of the next president’s Iraq strategy story it strikes me that for any candidate to commit to a strategy would be premature if not foolhardy for several reasons. In the first place January 2009 is a long way away, and any strategic plan would have to be loosely arranged to accomodate the changing situation in Iraq for implementation somewhere around March at the very earliest (giving six weeks for the new president to digest unvarnished information and roll out a plan). 

But far more importantly, are not both Senators McCain and Obama working with the same historically thin and stilted information the Bush administration has controlled and released at its whim since before the invasion? Whether it's cherry-picked NIE's, unaccounted-for billions invested in secret bases around the country (how smart will it look to leave those behind now that we've spent all that money on them?), or simply the Bush administration's ongoing efforts to classify and control all information to maximize political gain, why would anyone trust the available Bush-filtered information as a basis for sound policy? Trying to construct good strategy from bad information is foolish. 

Finally, as the Bush administration began to tip its hand last year showing its Stay-in-Iraq-Forever plan, clearly this is a political strategy where Bush's successor will be "stuck carrying Bush's turd", as a TPM commenter so succinctly put it. Given Bush's propensity for controlling information, it would be naive to think that Bush isn't trying to make things look as rosy as possible through the end of his term, hoping to make all blame for failure to achieve VICTORY fall on his successor. A wise policymaker would leave lots of room for adjustment (“recalibration”) for any strategy that hoped to deal with Bush’s stinking legacy in Iraq.

All this talk about strategy pisses me off. Devising an effective strategy in Iraq begins the day Bush leaves office. Wouldn't Obama be better off emphasizing his general principle that the American occupation in Iraq is the problem not the solution? There could be no clearer distinction between him and McCain than that. And rather than be suckered into devising a strategic plan based on Bush's lies and subject himself to the slings and arrows of a thousand armchair patriots, Obama could draw attention to Bush's malfeasance (and McCain's ostensible continuation of such) and pledge that his administration would use of intelligence and information to make good policy, not good politics.

Ted Bucklin